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The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another features a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.